“Be their names ever honored,” said one of the speakers at the
dedication of Boynton Hall in 1868 in tribute to the Institute’s
founders, “honored among their fellow citizens, among their
friends and cultivators of sound learning everywhere, as well as
among those to the latest generation, who shall especially reap
the fruits of their wise beneficence.”
Who shall especially—in no other category fall the friends, the
trustees, the alumni, the teachers, and students of Worcester Poly technic Institute in the year of 1965.
During the hundred years of W.P.I.’s existence many similar
schools have been founded. Some have disappeared, others have
thrived. The calendar has been the same for all of them—
admissions, semesters, graduations; the activities—social, athletic,
and academic. The development of complexity has been parallel,
the evolution of administration, comparable.
What, then, has made Worcester Tech unique? This is a question which deserves an answer before the Institute picks up the
challenge of what will make it unique in the future.
In the first place, the school has never known exactly what it
was. Its founding definitions were too new, too broad, too hazy,
to label it with any of the usual names or hamper it with any of
the prescribed patterns. The direction of each word in the school’s
first name, the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial
Science, resolved into healthy, continuous argument for many
years. Even after the adoption of a new name, the Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, the old concepts clung like barnacles. By
the time of its Centennial observance, the school had long been
acknowledged a college of engineering and science, and a new
name for a new role seemed to be imminent.
This constant search for identity has kept the school always
a-growing, always a-building. Rarely an imitator, sometimes an
innovator, the Institute has seldom been less than conservative
at many points where it did not matter, but always brave enough
where it did. Moreover, Tech has expressed an eagerness to work
out its own destiny.
At some edge of its educational program, the Institute has
always maintained contact with the real work of the world. The
school has prospered and languished according to the proportionate
strength of this contact, and the steam of endless controversy produced by it has generated unbelievable energy for the professors.
Human progress has always depended on the proverbial conflict
between the dream and reality. Sometimes one is in the lead;
sometimes the other. This is not a new idea, nor especially worthy
of note, except that at Tech the two have existed under the same
roof since the day the school first opened its doors. There was

Since we live in an age of innovation, a
practical education must prepare a man
for work that does not yet exist and
cannot yet be clearly defined.
—Peter F. Drucker

235

When a road is once built, it is a strange
thing how it collects traffic, how every
year as it goes on, more and more people
are found to walk thereon, and others
are raised up to repair and perpetuate it,
and keep it alive.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

236

even one founder for each factor. It has not always been a comfortable living arrangement, but when the battling has been the
fiercest, the school has been at its most alert. The Institute will
doubtless change in many ways as differences between theory and
fact continue to lessen, and there are many persons who face the
prospect with dismay. Let them be different, they say—like male
and female—but let them learn how to live together more happily.
Worcester Tech has maintained an unusual relationship with
the community in which it lives, its first building created from
one of Worcester’s own granite ribs. It was the mechanic, the
lawyer, the minister, and the manufacturer who lived around the
corner who built the school and brought it up as their own.
Alternately they have ignored and interfered, praised and criticized, protected and betrayed. But it is their own. For many years
before the building of dormitories, Worcester homes were the homes
of the students. And ever since, no matter where the students
and teachers have come from or with what background, they
have been welcomed as members of the Worcester family.
The school has reciprocated. There has never been a time when
the professors have not been willing to lend a hand in municipal
planning, when the doors of the Institute have not been open
to its neighbors. First there were courses in drawing, long before
the subject was taught in public schools. For many summers
young boys, eight to thirteen years old, were taught woodworking
in the Shops. Then there were public lectures, courses for me chanics, and Civil Defense instruction. Now there are seminars,
colloquiums, Scientific Briefings for Tomorrow, the School of
Industrial Management, and the Evening Graduate School. With
students coming from sixteen foreign countries, with staff partici pation in teacher-refresher programs sponsored by the National
Science Foundation, and with the adoption of a missionary interest in a sister Institute—the Scree Mullapudi in India—W.P.I.
often finds itself in the neighborhood of a wider world. But the
sense of proprietorship has not changed.
For these factors of uniqueness—the constant inquiry into identity, the contact with the work-a-day world, the reconciliation of
the practical with the scientific, the community sense of belonging
—there has been a price. There have been contributions of time
and funds and effort far beyond the accounting. Nerves have
been rubbed raw with abrasive argument, careers have sometimes
been mistakenly shattered. There has been an astonishing number of persons willing to be hurt in order to keep faith with self
and society, and the integrity thus given to the Institute is its
proudest claim to distinction.
Today the Institute stands solidly atop its rounded hill, still
overlooking the City and reaching toward the sky. It stands there
for more than any other reason because—by some strange and wonderful supply—there have always been enough people who cared.

SOURCES
INTERvIEWS
INDEx

SOURCES

This is not a bibliography but an informal list of sources, included primarily for that
person of the future who will again bring Worcester Tech’s history up to date. —M.M.T.